^ this. there's a lot i like from Austral, but I think I disagree on some fundamental level with the "simplicity" goal. I simply don't think it is necessarily conductive to less errors, and expressivity of a language matters. There is a balance to be found.

For example, Rust-style iterators are "complex", yet they cause less errors than explicit indexing. Their combinators, that afford a lot of their expressivity, would cause very difficult to write types without type inference.

There's a similar tale of expressivity vs simplicity in the current implementation of the borrow checker in rust that is not using lexical (tied to a syntactic scope) lifetimes. For having used rust before non lexical lifetimes were a thing I can guarantee that from a user's point of view it is worth all the complexity in the rules and the implementation. I also have a hard time to imagine a serialization framework like serde without the ability to derive traits with an annotation.

Separating interface and implementation opens up to (compile time, fortunately) errors when they don't match, and brings no gain: the public interface can be generated by tools like cargo doc.

Ada style syntax I find difficult to read (I prefer braces) but this is purely a product of familiarity I think

The document also says the language does not feature unwinding panics. What does it has then?

The capability system is interesting, but I am surprised in the hello world example that printing to the console doesn't seem to require a dedicated capability.

I think an extension to this capability system would be some sort of tie-in with the OS so that a given process can start with only a subset of the root capability